Find My Dead

Genealogy of Sharon & Scotty

General Genealogical Posts

General Genealogical Posts, McLean/Frith/Brimlow/Brown

Union Cemetery in Brooklyn 1851-1897

Unburying Your Dead

One of the more frustrating aspects of genealogy is attempting to locate a death date and burial location for your ancestor. You know your ancestor is dead, and you know that his/her death occurred between 1870 and 1880 since there is census information on the individual in 1870 and a widowed spouse in 1880. But death records were not common in the 19th century. Finding a cemetery list naming your ancestor is just as exciting as finding a maiden name for your fourth great grandmother. We’re all hopeful that there’s a tombstone to provide us the full dates of births and death, and maybe even what damn county or shire in England, Scotland, or Ireland they came from. But in most of my families, cemetery information and tombstones have been scarce.

Now, imagine you’re lucky enough to discover which cemetery your ancestor is in, only to learn they aren’t there because that cemetery no longer exists. And, not only does it no longer exist, the records are missing.

Case in point, Union Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Union Cemetery was created in 1851 on 10 acres in the Eastern District of Brooklyn. In brief, the cemetery was founded by two churches – one from New York City and one from Brooklyn. The New York church sold its share to the Brooklyn church in 1875. Then in 1897, the Brooklyn church decided to sell the land after the burial site was full. Over 30,000 burials had occurred on the site, and all those bodies needed to be relocated. Families were given the choice of arranging for relocation themselves or letting the contractor hired by the church relocate the bodies. All bodies not claimed by a family were relocated to a ten-acre plot within Cedar Grove Cemetery in Flushing. This task was accomplished within a sixty-day period from December 1897 through January 1898. According to newspaper articles, single boxes was to be used to hold the contents of each grave, and the remains were then reinterred at Cedar Grove in corresponding order along with associated monuments. The burial occurred in numbered plots matching the order of removal.

But that’s where the recorded trail takes a giant dump. [Read more…] about Union Cemetery in Brooklyn 1851-1897

General Genealogical Posts, Scott/Beatty/Shaffer/Olinger

Special Thanks

Being in Tucson and researching in Pennsylvania comes with a few challenges. However, it also comes with its own set of rewards. You meet some of the nicest people when you are researching your family. While I tried to photograph most of the tombstones the last time I was in Pennsylvania, I of course missed a few I knew of, and then there were all the confirmed discoveries in the last year as I’ve worked the line. I have tried to add memorials on Find A Grave for the families as I found them.

Of note has been Ralph Satterfield, who has claimed almost every photo request that I put up on Find A Grave. Throughout January, Ralph has made repeated trips to Elderton and Plum Creek Presbyterian Church Cemetery to photograph the tombstones of the Beatty, and Shaffer clan. His photographs have been incredibly helpful as he often provides a close-up of the dates. It is a combination of his photos and mine that you have been seeing on the tombstone posts about this family. No doubt, he will be photographing more stones as I move on to working the Olinger and Yount lines. Thank you, Ralph. I appreciate all your hard work.

For those of us who research seriously, it’s an incredible pleasure to bump into someone who sources the information they put online. Diana Roche’s extremely well sourced tree for the Isaac LeFever/LeFevre family appears on Rootsweb and was instrumental in clarifying the family of Eximnia “Minnie” (Shaffer) LeFevre (1849-1897). Her work also provided me with information on two new sources, which I can now explore in hopes of finding more information on members of the Shaffer line. Thank you, Diana. It’s always a pleasure to see quality work.

I have also enjoyed help from Beatty researcher Cynthia Joyner. She is one of the contacts on the Beatty 2000 project for our Line #84, the line of Andrew Beatty’s descendants. As with most genealogists, she was generous in sharing her research with me.

Thanks go out to all the folks on Find A Grave who were kind enough to respond to my requests to either transfer memorials or add dates, bios, and family links. I’m happy to add and update these memorials as we go along.

We don’t “own” our ancestors, but for those of us who do this, we have a responsibility to ensure the information we post is as correct as possible. We also have a responsibility to provide our sources to other researchers and not repeatedly copy unsourced and possibly incorrect information without noting that the material is “for research only” or at least documenting where it came from. Thank you all for helping me work toward making the information provided on our common line as correct as possible.

Burgraff/Kortlever/Stek/Bel, General Genealogical Posts

Basic Info on Tuberculosis

People have forgotten just what a scourge the disease of tuberculosis was. Entire families were afflicted by this disease and it was a common cause of death among the young as well as the old. TB has been around a long time – researchers have found evidence of the disease in prehistoric human remains and Egyptian mummies. I’m going to stay very non-technical in this post – if you want to know more just Google the history of tuberculosis and prepare to be overwhelmed!

The two types of tuberculosis in our family were known as pulmonary tuberculosis and “bone” or extrapulmonary tuberculosis. The primary cause of TB is a bacillus – in really lay terms “a bacterium” that can divide roughly every 16 to 20 hours. It’s not considered a fast grower, but it is a hearty little devil and can withstand weak disinfectants and survive in a dry state for several weeks.

Pulmonary tuberculosis is spread by the cough, sneeze, or spit of an infected person becoming airborne and someone else inhaling it. Think about the close living arrangements of families on farms and it’s easy to see how entire families were infected. Infection with TB did not always equate to the disease becoming active – I have seen numbers in my reading that stated anywhere from 15-40% of those infected became active.

Generally, the bone type of TB was acquired through the consumption of unpasteurized milk or consumption of meat from an in infected cow. On the Washington State Department of Agriculture website there is a compiled history concerning the State Veterinarian. There is an entry discussing tuberculosis testing of cattle that states, “Herds of up to 150 head were often found to be 100 percent reactive.”1 This was during a time when every farmer had from 4-10 dairy cows for production of, at least, the family milk, and they usually sold the extra to the local dairy. The farmers also had a few young steers that they raised to butcher and almost all of these cattle carried the disease. “It would take until 1988 before Washington is declared Tuberculosis free by the Washington State Agricultural Department.”2

The real break-through in stopping the spread of TB came in 1944 when a new antibiotic called Streptomycin was administered for the first time. It immediately stopped the progression of the disease and the bacteria disappeared from the sputum, making the chance of recovery was excellent. All diseases mutate to survive and TB immediately did so, but new combinations of drugs solved most of those problems. In developed countries TB has been significantly reduced. It remains a huge problem in undeveloped countries and new drug resistant strains are still being found. This development came after many in my Burgraff and Kortlever line died from the disease.


1. Washington State Dept. of Agriculture, Washington State Dept. of Agriculture – Animal Health (http://www.secstate.wa.gov/library/docs/AGR/SL_AGR2004_000007.html : accessed 19 Jun 2009), 1929 entry.
2. Ibid.